archive: bryce.weblogs.com

Insanely Great

I did it. I finally did it. I downloaded my first tune from Apple's iTunes Music Store this morning. And I am hooked. The experience was magical -- and exactly how I've always thought ecommerce could be. Expect to find an iPod on my wish list this year.

It's a big week for Apple: The NY Times provides a compelling layman's account of the new Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther" released today.

Elliott Smith Has Died in Apparent Suicide

MTV has a good retrospective of his life and musical career that details his time in Portland. I always thought his lyrics were a little depressing, but ...

Pumpkin Carving is Fun!

Don't tell anyone, but I spent part of the weekend carving pumpkins. I'd forgotten how much fun it can be. If you haven't carved one in a while, stop whatever you are doing and go find yourself a pumpkin to carve. Right now. Seriously! The hunt for the "right" pumpkin takes on a Charlie Brown like quality. And the carving itself? Well, it's really just a process of taking a stab at it and discovering how quickly your creative juices start flowing when you're having fun and acting like a kid again. Go on, try it. You'll thank me for it.

Disposable Addresses The Latest Shield Against Spam

MSNBC: "In an August survey, 77 percent said they would rather clean a toilet than sort through the junk e-mail in their inbox."

In the eternal battle against spam, Yahoo! today announced a major new feature for users of its Y! Mail Plus service. Called AddressGuard, it steals a page from what American Express and other credit card companies have offered for over a year now: disposable identifers. The idea is simple: people were scared to transmit their actual credit card number across the internet so AmEx and others created disposable, single-use numbers that could be created on the fly and used in place of the actual number. Now Yahoo! has taken the idea and applied it to e-mail addresses. Rather than give out one's actual address to a questionable e-commerce site or in an online forum, users will be able to create disposable addresses. In a slight twist, these addresses will exist until the user deletes them. While the idea is good, the implementation isn't perfect. All disposable addresses have to have the same prefix that, once-assigned, won't be changeable. What would be really nice is if Yahoo! would support, say, three prefixes for different classes of "disposable" addresses. Consider: 1st class for your bank contact, etc; 2nd class for newletters and 3rd class for near-junk mail.

 

Giving Google AdSense a Trial Run...

When Google launched its AdSense program earlier this year, I -- like many bloggers and small publishers -- was intrigued. I experimented with it for a few days and ultimately decided against using it for a variety of reasons, including the terms & conditions and the formatting options. While Google now claims to have something like over 140,000 publishers in the program (according to an article in yesterday's WSJ), many bloggers have had a poor experience with the service. Still, a recent revision of the terms for AdSense, as well as the WSJ article yesterday has motivated me to give AdSense a trial run here. I don't expect to get rich. If anything, it would just be nice to defray the cost of hosting this site. At the end of the day, you -- the readers -- are most important so let me know your thoughts. Thanks.

Apple Launches iTunes for Windows

It's official: the rest of the world can now have iTunes, too! Check out the front page of Apple.com today -- no bravado at all. ;) Microsoft's site, in comparison, looks dreadfully business-like.

The future has arrived.

Napster & Friends...

Wired is reporting that Apple is readying to release its iTunes online music store for Windows PCs as early as this week. Over the weekend, I downloaded and tested MUSICMATCH, which some think will "own" the Windows market. My first impression is that it is a mediocre knockoff of the iTunes UI (user interface). And the song selection is still far from great. I tried to download "Red Light", the hit new single by Johnny Lang and it doesn't exist -- despite the fact the album hit stores today and the track has been on radio waves for a month. Personally, I am hoping that Apple is able to make iTunes for Windows the success it already is on the Mac.

Then there is Napster. The service that started it all is back, or at least its cat logo is. Roxio bought the intellectual property rights to it earlier this year and is slapping it on a repurposed pressplay, picked up from the bargain basement of the labels' first failed attempts at a secure online music service. It hasn't launched yet, but they are aggressively promoting a pre-registration for Napster with 5 free tracks. That may be the last time you see "free" and "Napster" in the same sentence.

Finally, some commentary....

NetMusicCountdown: "Another hurdle facing Napster 2.0 is the announcement from Apple that their extremely successful marriage of iTunes, the iPod and the iTunes Music Store is about to go Windows. Apple's integration is legendary, and the recreation of one of the most satisfying downloading and streaming experiences to date for the average Windows user will be a benchmark hard to beat."

When Something New is Something Old

Over the weekend, I listened to a CD that I hadn't listened to in a while and re-discovered John Mayer's big-label debut "Room For Squares" to be quite good. It's only coincidental that I first saw John Mayer live in concert two years ago last weekend.

New at Newstands This Month...

Salon: "A popular new Bible for teen girls dresses up the New Testament to look and read exactly like a fashion magazine."

Discover Someone New; Fall In Love; Gaze Often

I am pleased to announce that, earlier this morning, we went "live" with our newest artist over at scene sketches: the photography gallery.  Richelle Semenza joins us from San Francisco (well, technically Oakland) and has been an absolute delight to work with over the past several months. I encourage you to visit the gallery and explore her work. If you decide to buy one of her prints this month, mention this posting and save 20%. You always knew reading my blog would be profitable. Now it is.